morrowlife

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Three at the Wedding of the Century, looking just a little nervous. Maybe he didn’t want to be recognized.

Back to work. I’m sleepy – should have gotten to bed earlier. Probably won’t tonight either, and tomorrow’s Massive Meeting Tuesday, so I’ll be turning in late again. Sigh.

Things at work were about the way I left them, which is fine. At least they missed me. Sort of.

The weekend was nice – warm and sunny. Loyal Reader Number Two and I got a few things done on Saturday – cleaned the pool filters and washed the Miata, chiefly. He went over to a friend’s house on Friday afternoon, so Loyal Reader Number Four and I went out for Chinese dinner, which was enjoyable. Loyal Readers Numbers Five, Six, and Twelve came over for the weekend mid-day on Saturday. We did the Easter things together and had a very nice time. Jacuzzified on Saturday evening, which we don’t do often enough.

So it was just a normal, pleasant weekend. No complaints.

We have some highly important toilet news: They’re finally reaching potty parity in New York. The huddled masses are finally breathing free.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number One with a portrait of the great Liberace. LRN1 is the one on the left.

Extreme Short Shrift. My Tuesday evening meeting went WAY long and it’s long past my bedtime.

All is well, nothing is new.

I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this report of what may be the unluckiest man in the world.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s the world-famous Bobcat at this weekend’s campout. Check out those awning lights. Part of my famous Camping series.

Welcome to the Morrowlife Blog’s seven hundredth post! That’s a whole lot of Great Art and a whole lot of Marginal Content. And there’s more where that came from.

The Blog is back! Pleasant long weekend. The campout was pretty much as I had hoped – pleasant weather, lots of reading and relaxing, and very comfortable. We got home a few hours before it started raining hard, so even the timing was just right.

This was my second visit to Dos Reis. It’s a small campground of a single loop with roughly 25 sites. I believe all of them have full hookups, which is rare here in California. It’s really nice to be able to turn on the lights without worrying about the battery and run the water without worrying about the tanks.

The campground is on the river and has a boat ramp, so it’s populated mainly by fishing people, who are nearly uniformly quiet good neighbors. No loud music and only one hillbilly family shouting nasty words into their cell phone. And that lasted only about half an hour, anyway.

We went to the scout spaghetti dinner on Friday evening, as planned. I think I may have mentioned previously that they hold a spaghetti sauce contest in conjunction with the event, which ensures the sauce is plentiful and delicious. They held a small silent auction, at which I successfully bid on an electric toothbrush. My dentist had recommended one the previous day, so the timing was perfect. I got it for a scandalously low price.

The toothbrush kit actually came with two toothbrushes and a single charger, a huge bottle of Listerine (which my dentist had also praised for its antibacterial properties), a bunch of toothbrushes (including several princess models that will be ideal for Loyal Reader Number Twelve), another bunch of little tubes of toothpaste, and about a gazillion little containers of floss. It was all donated by our friends who run a dental office or two. I have no idea what I’m going to do with all that dental floss.

Speaking of LRN12, she and Loyal Reader Number Five came over for a visit on Saturday afternoon. They’ve both been quite sick (Loyal Reader Number Six has avoided it so far – I have no idea how) but they were both doing much better by Saturday. It was a delight to have them over.

Sunday was extremely busy, but I did manage to put in a couple hours of work on my downstairs media center PC. The newly-named Shemp machine was unable to take my new video card, so I dusted off another hand-me-down computer now named Joe. It didn’t have a working OS, so I got a copy of XP Pro from Loyal Reader Number One, which I got installed. There’s lots more configuring left to do, but I think it’s going to work.

Some important toilet news came up in my absence: the space toilet is on the fritz again. Suddenly, my desire to be an astronaut has dropped even more. I guess it’s better than being in Brussels, though.

See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Two testing his bridge at the Science Olympiad. It held! Check out those safety goggles. Special cameo appearance by Loyal Reader Number Four.

Fairly Short Shrift tonight. Took the late train, and I have to get ready to travel tomorrow morning, so some preparation must take place.

I took a chance today. I’ve been planning to buy a couple new HDTVs because I couldn’t find a video card that could talk to an old-fashioned RCA jack on an old-fashioned tube TV. Well, today I saw an ad for an old-model video card that claims to do just that. It was offered for thirty bucks. I bought it. It also has an S-video connector and two VGA ports, so it was apparently fairly hot stuff when it was new on the market.

The risk is that it won’t end up working like I need it to, thus wasting the thirty bucks. My judgment was that it was worth risking $30 for the chance of saving $300. Sadly, it has no DVI port, so it will be truly useless in the event it won’t drive an old TV. Fingers are crossed.

Loyal Reader Number One had his phone interview with Apple today. It appears to have gone well. They surprised him with the need to propose a personal project to spend half-time working on, so he needs to come up with some ideas and get back to them. The good thing is that the interview seemed more like a final-decision talk than a screening call. I hope it works out for him. It would be a great summer.

Any news in the education field today? Let’s check: Here’s a great moneymaker!

Speaking of which, we’re long overdue for a Morrowlife financial juggernaut update: I’m up to $13! Exactly! I think I’ve reached critical mass. I can sense the blog has just gone over the tipping point. Riches are inevitable!

Posting tomorrow is unlikely – we’ll be in Las Vegas. Wifi and time availability are doubtful. We’ll see.

One bit of bad wedding news is that Loyal Readers Numbers Five, Six, and Twelve are too sick to go. Get well soon, Loyal Readers! We’ll miss you.

See you tomorrow. Or maybe Monday.

Here’s Buddy, Loyal Reader Number Two’s first water rocket, on the launch pad at the Science Olympiad. Its identical twin was Skippy. Buddy did better than Skippy, largely because of a setup glitch. They’ll never fly again, though. The cleanup crew apparently decided our bucket of rockets was trash, and they threw it all away. Sigh. At least they took third place in their one and only outing.

Perfect weather again today. Near-freezing temperatures overnight and warm and sunny all day.

Odd day. I have one subordinate who constantly asks me to approve unbelievably high expenses. Today, he asked for $700 worth of label-making supplies, which he tells me will be used over the next six months. I decline to believe this. Two days ago, he asked me to approve ten power cords for the lab. When I asked how many he needs to use right now, he told me he needs three. The other seven were supposed to be spares. I approved two spares. I’m going to approve one or two hundred dollars’ worth of the label supplies.

I wish he’d quit wasting his time and mine on these ludicrous things. We both have better things to do.

I checked out chargers for my Palm today. I can get a cheap Chinese knockoff for about $3 including shipping, or an official Palm one for about twice that much. I’m going to order the Palm one tonight, based on the numerous negative reviews of the cheap one.

I’m also going to (finally) order the computer remote control tonight. If I can find the one I was looking at a few weeks ago. I had a quick look at Amazon, and can’t find it. Need to do a little detective work.

Otherwise, the evening’s mine, I believe. Need to get to bed at a reasonable hour and maybe do a little preparation for Friday’s trip to the Wedding of the Century. Check the Honda’s oil, make my packing list, etc.

Let’s check on today’s food violence/dog news: They’re a bunch of liars. But they’re also philanthropic. However, they can be rather strict. Unfortunately, they’re just too darn noisy.

There’s a new iPod Shuffle! It’s smaller than a AA battery and has no controls on it other than a power switch. The rest of the controls are on the earbud cord. It talks. It’s aluminum and stainless steel. It has 4 gigabytes. It costs $79. We really need one.

Apple has a way of making all their formerly cool hardware look sort of dowdy as soon as they bring out the next generation, don’t they? My first-generation Shuffle was pretty slick, not to mention extremely tiny, when I got it. Now it’s just old. Although I still love it. My 80-gig iPod was the ultimate in cool until just recently. I still love it too, but now it’s yesterday’s news. The funny thing is that I generally like older technology. I just like Apple’s new stuff better.

Speaking of which, best of luck to Loyal Reader Number One in his phone interview tomorrow. I’m sure he’ll do well, so it will probably come down to whether they think they need his skill set this summer. I hope they decide they do.

A word or two about the Safari 4 beta. I installed it as soon as it came out. There’s some good and some bad. The good: The cover flow view is pretty, although surprisingly not as useful as you might think it would be. I prefer to just start with my home page. Which you can make it do, of course. The bad: Putting the tabs in the window’s title bar. It’s not just bad. It’s wretched. I’m used to the tabs being directly above the business portion of the window, and that’s where I want them. There was absolutely no reason for moving them. And they’re stupid up there. It also seems to be really slow. Otherwise, another hit from Apple.

See you tomorrow.